


the seasons will change us new

by iaquilam



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, M/M, Post-Canon, Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish, literally just tooth-rotting nonsense, post-trk, they're soft and happy and deserve good things, this is literally just ronan admiring adam for 2k words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 23:33:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17334464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaquilam/pseuds/iaquilam
Summary: “Okay,” he says finally. “Just the once, Lynch.”Ronan grins at him. “You’re a fucking gorgeous beast of pride, Parrish.”“All you do is spout utter nonsense at me,” Adam says, but warmth is spreading across his face like Ronan’s smile is hitting him the same way orange sunset light does.Ronan picks Adam up from a late shift at the garage, buys him waffles, and drives him home. This is the soft and uncomplicated ending they deserve.





	the seasons will change us new

**Author's Note:**

> i got sad over the weekend and bashed out 2k words of fluff to comfort myself bc in 2019 we're not wallowing in melancholy! title is from an incredible pynch-appropriate song called 3 rounds and a sound by blind pilots. enjoy my loves :D

The garage is completely quiet aside from the clinking of Adam’s tools as he performs his private and laborious rituals of mechanics under the belly of a beat-up truck. The only part of him that can be seen are his legs from the knees down, poking out from beneath the front bumper, skinny and clad in dirty denim. The left sole of his off-brand sneakers is peeling off. 

Ronan, safe in the knowledge that Adam can’t see him, privately smiles at the sight. 

“I can see your boots, you know,” Adam’s voice says from under the truck, muffled. “If you’re trying to sneak up on me it’s not working.”

“Right,” Ronan says drily, “because I have nothing better to do than stand around your dingy place of employment and try to surprise you.”

“I happen to know for a fact that you do not.” Adam emerges from the truck, balancing on his back on a skateboard and grinning at Ronan. There’s grease on his face and bags under his eyes. He looks tremendous. 

“Whatever, Parrish.” Ronan scuffs his boots against the pavement. “You said you’d be done for the night at ten.”

“Is it ten?” Adam squints at the clock, sits up. Yawns. “Fuck.” His accent slips through on _fuck_ , drawing out the vowel just a little longer than he usually would. “Let me close up, okay?”

“Yeah, hurry up.”

Adam rolls his eyes in Ronan’s general direction and begins to put away his tools. Ronan stands there a little awkwardly—no matter how often he comes to pick Adam up on a closing shift, he always feels little strange just watching the other boy close up. He feels like he should offer to help, an impulse that literally never strikes him in any other moment. Not like Adam would let him help even if he offered. So it doesn’t really matter. 

“Just you working tonight?”

“Everyone else left ‘bout an hour ago.”

Ronan makes a little sound of half-disapproval at Adam’s late hours, but not loud enough that Adam will berate him about how things cost money and most people have to work for their money and how he won’t be anyone’s pet _even if_ he is Ronan’s boyfriend. 

About fifteen minutes later, Adam’s finished. Throwing the last greasy rag down on acounter, he closes and locks the garage door, and joins Ronan where he’s standing over by the BMW. 

“All done?”

“Yeah.” Adam slips into the space next to him where he fits perfectly—crook of Adam’s elbow pressed against Ronan’s waist, head tilted back to rest against Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan turns his head and kisses the top of Adam’s head. The thrill of such a familiar gesture of affection shudders through both of them. They’re still learning how to love quietly. How to love without violence. 

“Hands?”

Adam grumbles something inaudible and presents his hands to Ronan, who envelopes them in his own, checks for new cuts and roughness. Presses a kiss to the middle knuckle of his right hand, because why not.  
“You’re ridiculous,” Adam says. 

“Look who’s talking.”

“I haven’t done anything, you massive sap.”

“It’s your existence that’s ridiculous,” Ronan says. “Head home?”

“Yeah.” 

“Want to stop and eat?” 

Adam hesitates getting into the car, hesitates in the way that means he’s starving but can’t afford it. It’s the end of the month; Ronan knows he lives paycheck to paycheck, that the last week of every month consists of skipped meals and pinched pennies. “Nah, I’m fine,” he says, shutting the car door behind him at the exact moment that his stomach growls so loudly it briefly sounds like an avalanche is coming. 

Ronan crooks an eyebrow. 

“Seriously.”

“I owe you for pizza last week.”

“No, you don’t,” Adam says swiftly, ever scrupulous with his mental record of every debt he owes or is owed. 

“I do, though.”

“Ronan, I don’t need you to p—”

“I know you don’t need me to,” Ronan says, maybe a little too loudly. Winces. Remembers he’s in a small space with Adam. Lowers his voice. “But I want to, okay? You can cover it next time if you want. I fucking swear. But like. Just this once? Not because you’re hungry or because I want to pay for all your shit or anything. Just because I want to take my boyfriend out for food after a long day.”

There’s a long silence. Adam lets out a long breath, and Ronan knows he’s fighting the impulse to lash out, protest that Ronan is trying to own him. 

“Okay,” he says finally. “Just the once, Lynch.”

Ronan grins at him. “You’re a fucking gorgeous beast of pride, Parrish.”

“All you do is spout utter nonsense at me,” Adam says, but warmth is spreading across his face like Ronan’s smile is hitting him the same way orange sunset light does. 

They drive through the warm Henrietta night, the unholy racket of cicadas seeping through the closed windows. Adam’s music is playing in the BMW from the last time Ronan drove him home, and Ronan doesn’t have the heart to change it, even as an attempt to piss Adam off. 

Things have changed. They’ve grown up, abruptly and self-consciously. Ronan suspects they all have nostalgia for times that seem too recent to be nostalgic about. 

He reaches over and takes Adam’s hand. 

“Eyes on the road,” Adam says. His head is tilted back against the head rest and his eyes are closed. 

“How do you know I’m looking at you?”

“Psychic powers,” Adam says, and the corner of his mouth curls up like a vine toward the sun. “You’re also very predictable.”

“Fuck off.”

Someday Ronan is probably going to crash this car with both of them in it because he’ll be so busy looking at Adam. And he doesn’t think he should be blamed for it, either: he spent so much time training himself not to look at Adam that he can’t stop now he has the right to. He’s making a private catalog what Adam’s face looks like in every possible light on earth. Here and now, washed in the red of a stoplight Ronan is actually observing for once, he looks unearthly, a monochromatic alien made familiar only by the smudge of grease on his cheekbone. 

“It’s green,” Adam says without opening his eyes when it changes and Ronan doesn’t hit the gas immediately. 

“Are you actually using psychic powers?” Ronan asks, teasing.

Adam snorts, opens one eye to give Ronan a mocking look. “You know you can see changes in light intensity and color through your eyelids, right?”

“Suck my dick, nerd.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Adam shoots back, but he sounds so tired and looks so peaceful that it comes out more funny than flirtatious. “Stop laughing at my raw animal magnetism.”

They pull into the parking lot of Henrietta’s only 24-hour diner, a little shithole of a place with food as cheap as it is greasy, which is considerably so in both cases. Adam groans, stretches, rolls more than steps out of the BMW. 

“My back hurts from that fuckin’ skateboard,” he says when Ronan gives him a quizzical look. 

“Pretty soon you’ll never have to get under a car again, Mr. Harvard.”

“During the summer I will,” Adam says, trying to sound repressive but unable to stop a glow of pride from lighting up his face. 

The letter from Harvard had meant more than every other acceptance combined. An acceptance from the school of his dreams—and, just as importantly, a full ride. He’d explained it to Ronan: tuition, fees, and room and board all paid for because he earns less than sixty five grand a year, and a monthly living stipend because he’s a fucking nerd who’s just so smart Harvard is willing to pay him to attend (that had not been how he phrased it; he’d said _merit scholarship_ like it was powerful incantation). Ronan, who has never cared once about where anyone goes to college, treasures the memory of the smile on Adam’s face when he’d opened the letter as one of his own happiest memories. 

When they go into the diner, it’s empty except for a pair of grizzled older guys sitting at the counter stools who amicably jerk their chins at Adam when they walk by. Adam nods back soberly. Ronan feels their approval seep over into him despite the muscle tee and shaved head and tattoo, just because he’s with Adam. 

“Know ‘em from the factory,” Adam says as they sit down, and for a moment, Ronan sees him as the men probably do: a quiet, serious, skinny kid who works twice as hard as everyone else even when he’s nodding off from exhaustion. Someone you can always count on to pick up a shift when you want a night with the wife and kids. A boy with nice Henrietta manners, with his feet firmly on the ground and his head screwed on straight. A real trooper, as they say.

Ronan has only ever seen Adam as something foreign and fragile. A magician, a seer, a proud boy with his bruised chin always tilted up. A study in barely restrained fury and desperate ambition. A wild thing that thrills with his horror and his loneliness and his familiarity. 

Ronan cannot imagine thinking that Adam is anything mundane. 

“Stop looking at me,” Adam says without looking up from the menu. 

“You’re a fucking egomaniac.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“You don’t know I’m looking at you.”

Adam looks up, directly into Ronan’s eyes. There’s a moment of breathless eye contact—Adam’s eyes are the blue of storm clouds, of a hidden puddle that suddenly flashes with a glimpse of the sky—and then Adam smiles. Sudden and warm and full of something that screams _we are made of the same stuff_. “You always think I’m not paying attention, Lynch.”

“Just pick something to fucking order,” Ronan grumbles. 

“Blueberry waffles,” Adam says. “And you want chocolate chip pancakes. I have literally never seen you order anything else when chocolate chip pancakes are an option.”

“I fucking hate you, you know that?”

“Yeah, you’ve said.” 

They grin at each other, feet tangling together under the table. Ronan feels the beginnings of an exquisitely painful pressure in his ribcage. 

(He’d described this feeling to the maggot at some point when he was drunk, and she’d snorted. _That’s called being happy, idiot,_ she’d said, and Ronan had flipped her off. And then maybe hugged her. Maybe said something along the lines of _well then, Adam makes me happy_. He’d been drunk, so it’d been fine.)

“Orders?” the bored waitress asks when she slouches over to their table. 

Adam orders blueberry waffles, Henrietta accent slipping through in a tacked-on _thank you, ma’am_. Ronan orders chocolate chip pancakes, because he never orders anything else when chocolate chip pancakes are an option. Adam sends him a smug look.

Ronan knows he’ll keep existing when Adam goes away to school in the fall, but he’s having trouble picturing it. 

“Work tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah. Not until eight, though, so not early.”

Ronan can’t wait until Adam can live a life where eight o’clock is early to start working. 

“At least you don’t have to go to Shitglionby.”

“Aglionby wasn’t that bad,” Adam says mildly. “And surely you could have come up with something better than Shitglionby?”

“It was a stepping stone for you and a fucking waste of time for me,” Ronan says. “And they hired a homocidal maniac to teach us shit, like, multiple times. It was really that bad.”

Adam’s responding cough sounds a lot like _drama queen_. 

When their food comes, there’s a few solid minutes of silence; Adam because he’s busy eating, Ronan because he’s busy watching Adam eat. Because Adam eating is a vulnerable and unguarded thing, because it’s something he can enjoy whole-heartedly and simply. Because he looks fucking great smiling at Ronan with blueberries in his teeth and whipped cream on his nose. 

He takes a chocolatey bite of pancake and feels the pressure in his ribcage swell like a golden balloon. 

On the way home, Adam dozes off in the passenger’s seat. At a stop light, Ronan strokes his hair, smudges the grease off his cheek. In a month and a half, Adam will be moving into a dorm at Harvard, and he will no longer have the pleasure of watching Adam’s eyelashes flutter against his cheekbones in his sleep as he dreams his dreams of sentient forests and his father’s fists. His dreams laced with the sound of clinking mechanic’s tools and Latin. 

Adam’s fingers curl into themselves around the edge of his t-shirt.

In the church apartment, Adam stumbles to the shower, leaving the bathroom door a crack open. Ronan sits on the mattress without turning on the light so that the bathroom door casts a thin amber rectangle on the floor. Through the gap between the door and the doorframe, he can see Adam stripping off his shirt and running the water. He has a scar on his shoulder blade that Ronan has never asked about; it shines silver in the warm bathroom light. For a moment, he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror—eyes still half-closed with sleep—and then steps into the shower and out of Ronan’s line of vision. 

“You didn’t take your pants off,” Ronan calls.

Adam reappears in doorway, flips him off, and sheds his now-damp jeans. 

“Boxers too,” Ronan says. 

“Creep,” Adam tosses back, dropping his boxers to the floor. But he doesn’t close the bathroom door, and Ronan gets a glimpse of him before he disappears again, all tanned and freckled skin unmarred by the watercolor of his father’s bruises. Ronan feels a pull of something complicated—admiration, arousal, contentment—in his stomach. 

He grins and flops down on the mattress, staring down the dim light on the ceiling. The sounds of Henrietta filter in through the window—quiet, familiar sounds of old cars and cicadas and creaking buildings. Somewhere far away, Gansey and Henry and Blue are listening to an entirely different orchestra of sound. And somewhere even farther away, perhaps Noah is listening to something too. Regardless: Ronan is listening to his boyfriend hum in the shower. There’s nothing else he’d rather listen to. 

He must doze off at some point, because the next thing he knows, Adam is curled into his side, chin hooked over Ronan’s shoulder and arm thrown across his waist. It always strikes him how Adam, skittish and afraid to initiate physical contact when awake, is so soft and pliant when most vulnerable. In the blue moonlight, his jaw is slack and his eyelashes barely visible. Ronan will never tire of looking at Adam’s face without bruises on it. 

Gently, so he doesn’t wake the other boy, Ronan extracts himself from Adam’s arms and kicks off his jeans. Checks the room for dream objects (there are none). Presses a kiss to Adam’s t-shirt-clad shoulder where he knows the scar is. Then, just as carefully as he’d gotten out of bed, gets back in and puts his arm around Adam. 

Outside, Henrietta carries out whatever mysterious 3 AM rituals it must. The roads may not be clear of joyriders, or the forests of skeletons, but each such secret is swallowed in the damp summer night air. And in the attic of a church, a dreamer and a magician slumber peacefully, fingers tangled together in the quietest magic they have ever known. 

**Author's Note:**

> and there you have it, my incredibly sappy personal comfort fic. 
> 
> -because i am an incredibly self-indulgent individual, i make moodboards for all my fics, and you may find the one for this fic [here](https://iaquilam.tumblr.com/post/181796297225/the-seasons-will-change-us-new-by-iaquilam-okay)   
> -if you want to listen to me talk to myself, follow me on tumblr [here](http://iaquilam.tumblr.com) and maybe hmu so i'm no longer talking to myself  
> -a kudo and a comment keep me nourished and eager to write. just sayin.  
> -love u love u love u


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